The Bane that is Jane: Miss Fonda in her own mind.

Does Jane Fonda feel remorse? It is a question we never thought we'd be asking. But there have been some interesting developments of late in what Fonda refers to as "the last third of my life": First she found Christianity, and now she tells Oprah in an interview in Winfrey's new magazine O, "I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an antiaircraft carrier which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes . . . It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done."

Forget for a moment the malapropism of antiaircraft carrier, which recalls her famous spoonerism on The Dick Cavett Show in the '70s-in which she said that U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia had its roots in our ungodly desire for "tung and tinsten." Forget, too, other parts of this interview, in which Fonda betrays an unregenerate pride in having participated in the conscience-driven New Left along "with people like Tom Hayden who were living for more than just themselves." The fact is, it's hard to read her chat with Oprah and not feel that what Fonda finds horrible about her famous trip to North Vietnam was the photograph and "what it would look like," not the trip itself. "It was just thoughtless," she says of her impulsive decision to put on the helmet and get imaginary U.S. pilots in her gunsight. But couldn't this sentence stand as a judgment on all of her frenzied activities in the Movement? And doesn't her weird odyssey in radical politics warrant a much broader apology?

I ask this question particularly because of my own brief encounter with Jane, which warrants at least an agate-type footnote in the muddled and inchoate chronicle of her life. In January 1970, I got a call from one of her Hollywood flunkies. He told me that Jane had read a piece I'd done on radical American Indians in Ramparts, of which I was then an editor. She was currently in India on what turned out to be a dispiriting spiritual quest, having taken a vacation from her then- husband Roger Vadim. The flunky told me she wanted to return home to where the action was. A few days later, Jane herself called and asked if I would take her to Alcatraz and show her the Indian occupation there.

I said, naturally, that I would. When she showed up at the San Francisco wharf where we'd arranged to meet, she had her new shag haircut, and was dressed (jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt and a macrame bag) as if on a casting call for the new role she wanted. She chattered nervously as our yacht easily broke the halfhearted blockade imposed on Alcatraz by the Coast Guard. She said she was glad finally to have returned to where it "was happening" after her "exile" in France. I joked that she might be too late, the '60s just having ended. "Oh, I hope not," she gasped.

As we tied up, she stared at the bleeding slogans the Indians had painted on the rocks: Better Red than Dead. Indian Country. I introduced her around. She was an amazingly quick study, seeing immediately that there was a struggle for control of the island between the tribes lined up behind the Navajos and those behind the Sioux-and that the Sioux, with the cachet of their warrior past, were politically more correct. When I left Alcatraz, she was in their corner of the old prison exercise yard, smoking their dope and listening to their tales.

Jane's friend Brooke Hayward later told me, "She has always had a nose for the prevailing winds. From the beginning, her radicalism was chic." Perhaps. But this new incarnation was certainly as strenuously sought as her other self-reinventions-as the swanlike college student who ate tapeworm eggs in the dorm to keep thin (she was terrified by memories of her mother, who had slit her own throat, in part because she felt she was getting fleshy); as the ingenue who tried to one-up her famous father by studying the Method at the Actors Studio; as the young sophisticate who moved to France and became Vadim's latest sex kitten, thus bypassing the studio system in achieving her stardom; and all the other selves to come.

Becoming the Barbarella of the Movement was by far the best self yet for Jane-a self that, unlike the others, had depth and authenticity. She immediately saw it for what it was: the role of a lifetime. Within weeks she had acquired all the lingo ("Power to the People!" were the last words in the note, written in a backhanded slant, she sent me after the day on Alcatraz) of the Movement, all the perverse dogma of its theology. She moved quickly through the predictable stages-from liberal to radical to revolutionary-that it took the rest of us years to traverse. She went from the reservation Indians I arranged for her to visit, to the gun-toting braves of the American Indian Movement; from there to the Black Panther party (calling its leader, Huey Newton, right after he emerged from jail for murdering an Oakland cop, a "great, gentle man, the only man I've ever met who approaches sainthood"); and then to the Coffee House Movement, which hung out near Army bases aiming to create deserters out of recent inductees.

She became afflicted with the Movement's working-class heroism, although it always clashed with her stubborn narcissism. Alan Myerson, who directed her in Steelyard Blues, later said, "I can remember when she walked onto the set one morning and some flunky came up and said, 'Good morning, Miss Fonda.' Jane looked at her and said, 'Please, call me Jane. There are no stars anymore, just equals.' And then, almost without missing a beat, she turned and yelled out, 'Where's my dresser?'"

She went through the Movement like E. Coli, winding up-by 1972-immersed in the same confusion about its future that had sidelined radicals with far longer experience, who were now asking petulantly about the Revolution, "Won't it ever get here?" Then, in what Californians of the next era would call a harmonic convergence, she met Tom Hayden, who happened also to be at the end of his string.

Regarded by many in the New Left as an Everyman, Hayden had just been expelled from the Red Family, a Berkeley commune that was his last stop on a route that led from civil-rights work in the South, to urban insurrection in Newark, to field marshalship of the Gotterdammerung on the streets of Chicago in 1968, to his apotheosis as the New Left's General Giap in the most important front of the war for Vietnam-the domestic struggle in America.

Hayden was living semi-incognito in Los Angeles when he met Jane at a slide show she was doing on Vietnam. Later, she said of him, as she would of other alpha males in her male -dominated universe, "He saved my life." Hayden soon functioned as her ideologue (years later, when China invaded Vietnam, she called him in a panic from her movie set and inquired, "What's our position on this?") and also as her impresario. She had been contacted by the North Vietnamese in Paris the previous year, but nothing came of it. Tom, however, was a virtual ambassador to Hanoi for the New Left, having been there several times and having long trumpeted its "rice-roots democracy." He got her an invitation and set her up with propaganda handlers.

Thus the famous picture: She sat in the antiaircraft gun-not an antiaircraft carrier-smiling at the imagined prospect of shooting down U.S. bandits coming in from above to destroy this little piece of heaven on earth. It was her summary moment. Her father would be remembered as Tom Joad, her brother Peter as Captain America in Easy Rider. For Jane, the role that would define her forever was a snippet of videotape a few seconds long: Hanoi Jane.

If it was horrible, as she would claim to Oprah, it was primarily so because of the imagery:It was documentary evidence of her silliness that all the intervening years-the activism in Democratic politics, the philanthropic gestures, the commanding position inside the entertainment industry, the sultry nights in Atlanta watching Chipper Jones and the boys and doing The Chop-could never wipe out. There was a photograph! If she was truly sorry about that trip to Hanoi, Jane should have forgotten about the antiaircraft carrier and apologized for all the other things that happened during her visit, things that were far more malicious than that moment when radical chic turned into radical kitsch.

Allowing herself to be turned into a low-budget remake of Tokyo Rose, she visited villages and amplified the usual claims of burned babies and genocide. She stopped by the Hanoi Hilton and made claims, after brief visits with battered U.S. prisoners, that their treatment was generous and humane. She made flat-out propaganda broadcasts in which each word was worth a thousand pictures: "This is Jane Fonda in Hanoi. I'm speaking to the men in the cockpits of the Phantoms, in the B-52s, in the F-4s . . . You know that when Nixon says the war is winding down he's lying. . . . All of you in your heart of hearts know the lies. You know the cheating on the body counts, the fictionalized battle reports, and the number of planes that are shot down and what the targets really are. Knowing who [is] doing the lying, should you allow these same people and these same liars to define for you who the enemy is?"

And this image in the antiaircraft gun was not nearly so horrible as what happened when she came home, after she and Tom got married-a wedding within the war, as we radicals liked to say back then; a marriage soon consecrated by a son named Troi (after Nguyen van Troi, the Viet Cong fighter martyred in 1964 when trying to assassinate Robert McNamara), although, ingeniously, also able to be called Troy when it came time to create a popular front with The People.

In 1973, a year after her infamous trip, there was the truly horrible response to the first prisoners released by Hanoi, men Jane called "liars, hypocrites, and pawns." She was livid at the charge that these men had been tortured: "Tortured men do not march smartly off planes, salute the flag, and kiss their wives. They are liars. I also want to say that these men are not heroes." One of the first contingent of POWs said that, indeed, he had not only been tortured, but that the Vietnamese had tortured him-broken his arm-for the specific purpose of forcing him to see her during her visit to North Vietnam. Jane's response was a shrug: "Nobody's perfect, not even the Vietnamese." Putting the episode behind her, she and Tom decided a year later to take advantage of what he called "the Watergate moment" to return yet again to Hanoi to shoot the documentary Introduction to the Enemy, an effort to show the North Vietnamese as gentle peasant nationalists who- despite all the provocations-didn't hate the Americans.

These were horrible things. They were done, in one way or another, and to lesser or greater degree, by many of us back then. And it must be said that Jane deserves acknowledgment for having said anything at all about this indecent slice of history, when most of those she ran with have obeyed the only true law of the Left: Don't look back. Yet is this apology for being photographed in flagrante with her revolutionary love, tucked into all the vapid talk about her marriage and the life she envisions in her new multimillion-dollar home "in the 'hood," really enough?

Hate the sin and not the sinner, says the book Jane now professes to read. Her chat with Oprah suggests that this is an injunction she is not ready to follow, and that she is still secretly in love with both.